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Novo: To Revive- Job Creation Edition

Let’s explore this meaning on Novo and why it is valuable to us. Revive what? I’m sure we could extrapolate this to many things but I am going to keep it geared toward the economy. Clean energy, and eventually sustainable energy, can not only boost the economy now but provide residual benefit. An entire research paper can discuss this issue and throughout our journey we will explore different meanings of this concept, but this post is going to look at the impact of job creation specifically. Job creation potential is huge by investing in the future of energy.

The political economy institute ran a study on energy and job creation and concluded that investment in renewable sources for instance result in roughly 3 times the job creation as would the same investment into traditional fossil fuels. The same study showed that $1 million in spending on each category (traditional fossil or clean energy) found that traditional fossil results in 5.3 jobs created compared to 16.7 jobs created for the same level of investment into clean energy! What about the potential for these jobs? Well the Global Status Report estimates that there are roughly 500,000 jobs that could be created by investment into sustainable energy, and that is just in the United States. How about some real examples of this impact? A report done by the Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), an independent and non-partisan community that studies business and environment, references that in the first quarter of 2012 the amount of job potential from projects announced was over 40,000 nation-wide. That is over 40,000 jobs in one quarter of one year. The end result in 2012 was with a total of 110,000 jobs created, and by the end of 2013 we were looking at roughly 200,000 jobs created! Another piece of evidence for this post is with regard to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, specifically the energy portion (by the way, regardless of our own political affiliations the act was significant in development of clean energy). The Council of Economic Advisors looked at the energy portion of the stimulus and found that 720,000 were created through 2012 (that is some form of clean energy investment job, which while is a broad brush, is still jobs resulted from clean energy investment).

Again, this is just a small showcase of job growth and potential for it through clean energy. We will explore some more specific examples of this throughout our journey but this should at least provide some groundwork for how we can be “revived” through clean energy. If you have any questions or specifics you would to explore, please leave a comment. Also, follow me on twitter @devinxcombs, as I will include bits of exciting information there.